As an aspiring journalist, I do my best to be objective when I write stories for my reporting classes. Bias in the media is something often discussed. Some say it’s rampant, and it’s hard to know who and what to believe.

The completion of the first quarter of 2010 brings reports of which businesses and corporations are doing well and which are not doing so well. There’s one in particular that has me worried.

I have always viewed CNN as the most objective of the major cable news networks for a variety of reasons. The most important of these reasons is the type of programming, as well as the content. Wolf Blitzer, John King and Campbell Brown make more attempts to contextualize news rather than provide their own opinions on it.

In the article ‘CNN Fails to Stop Fall in Ratings,’ which ran Monday in The New York Times, Bill Carter writes, ‘CNN continued what has become a precipitous decline in ratings for its prime-time programs in the first quarter of 2010, with its main hosts losing almost half their viewers in a year.’

The two networks that have eclipsed CNN so quickly and mightily are MSNBC and Fox News. But I’m not here to say that the talking heads on both these channels are not smart. I may not agree with everything they say, but the Glenn Becks, Keith Olbermans, Bill O’Reillys and Rachel Maddows are not journalists. They’re analysts.

This is somewhat alarming.

There are stories about people shooting at congressional offices and throwing bricks through windows with messages attached to them as a result of the controversial health care bill. The U.S. is experiencing a fragile period politically because of its ideological divide.

The fact that people are straying from CNN means to me that this ideological divide has overcome us to the point that when we turn on our televisions during prime time, we’re not necessarily looking for objectivity. We’re looking for what we want to see and hear.

Americans obviously have a right to watch whatever they want to watch, but like I said before, analysts on MSNBC and Fox News are not journalists. Many people may confuse them for journalists. They confuse opinion for fact and mistake simple ideas as being the only solutions to our complicated problems.

CNN’s decline means the U.S. is headed even farther in a direction it’s been heading for a long time. The U.S. is heading away from the purely objective and further confusing the subjective for fact.

David Kaplan is a sophomore broadcast journalism and political science major. His column appears weekly and he can be reached at dhkaplan@syr.edu.
 

Published on March 30, 2010 at 12:00 pm